Sunday Reflection - "Reading the World"

For those of you interested in a truly global adventure, British freelance writer Ann Morgan set out in 2012 to spend "a year of reading the world," sampling literature from 196 countries.  As a result of that challenge, Morgan has written an intriguing book, "The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe" (U.S. and Canada title) or "Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer" (U.K. and the Commonwealth title).   As she explains,

The book examines the big questions I encountered during my adventure, such as how translation, censorship, cultural identity and technology affect the way we share and understand stories. It brings in some of the personal histories of the people I met on my quest, as well as my own reading experiences throughout my life, a whole lot more research and many other books. Ultimately, it explores how reading can change and shape us, and reveals the extraordinary power that stories have to connect us across cultural, geographical, political and religious divides.

As a companion to the book, Morgan kept a blog that provided her account of the books she read.  One description of a book, "Girls of Riyadh" by Saudi Arabian writer Rajaa Alsanea, illustrates the essence of the "extraordinary power that stories have to connect us" Morgan explores in her literary travels:

Faced with a world in which they are often not permitted so much as to sign their names or have coffee with a male friend without being arrested and interrogated, and yet are able to access all luxuries and comforts, as well as Western cult classics such as Clueless and, yes, Sex and the City, these girls of Riyadh lead schizophrenic lives. They conduct their love affairs in secret and remotely, they create fake personas online and they wear low-cut designer pieces under their abayas, which they queue up to change back into in the toilets on flights back from London, Paris and the States.

All this feels minor, however, when set against Alsanea’s achievement of exploding the single biggest weapon in the armoury of repressive regimes: that of making the oppressed group faceless and voiceless. Here, we are presented with four (five if you count the narrator herself) vivacious, witty, intelligent individuals, who despite the restrictions placed upon them attack life with energy and verve. We see educated girls testing the barriers that hem them in and brokering their own peace, or otherwise, with the codes with which they have been raised. And we see a marginalised group beginning to flex its muscles in the virtual sphere and discover the potential of the internet to help people visualize and effect changes such as those seen across much of the Arab world in 2011.

Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea (translated from the Arabic by Rajaa Alsanea and Marilyn Booth). Publisher (Kindle edition): Penguin (2008)

A special thanks to friend of the blog (and good friend period) P.E.C. for alerting us to Ms. Morgan's illuminating project!